Month: October 2016

The Pennsylvania Legislative Action Committee (PA-LAC) is the Harrisburg advocate for the approximately two million residents who live in the over 10,000 community associations in our state. It is the only voice in Harrisburg which represents community interests—and communities have expensive interests to defend.

Do you pay property taxes and other local taxes to your municipality and not receive the services that private homeowners routinely get? For example, do you pay for private trash removal on top of you your local taxes which remove your non-community neighbors? Do you pay for road or other infrastructure maintenance on your property while non-community roads are maintained from municipal taxes? Why are you paying twice for services which non-association residents only pay once? Would you like someone in Harrisburg to fight for you to correct this injustice? That someone is the PA-LAC. You need to support them.

Well, ‘is the LAC any good at defending my interests,’ you ask. Excellent question, and the answer is “yes, they are.”

In 2016 alone, the LAC has achieved a dramatic victory in Harrisburg which will save many communities thousands of dollars every time they need to amend their governing documents. In a third of Pennsylvania counties, Recorders of Deeds were charging associations a “per unit” fee to record their amendments. That fee often ranged from $10 to $15 per unit. In a 500 unit community, a simple one paragraph amendment (often required by legal procedures) might cost as much as $7,500. Yet in other counties, the identical registration would cost between $100 and $200. Senate Bill 1282, written by LAC attorneys, was passed by the legislature and signed by Governor Wolf and has removed this offensive, hidden tax.

Many other examples exist and you can read about them at www.cai-padelval.org/legislative/pennsylvania.

Join and support the PA-LAC, and make sure your community annually budgets its “dollar a door” contribution. If every community owner was willing to spend $1 a year toward protecting their own interests in Harrisburg, these onerous, unjust, and inequitable laws, taxes, and fees would never see the light of day.